Google Keeps Searches Fresh With Algorithm Update

Google said Thursday that it has revamped its basic search ranking algorithm to push more up-to-date results to the top of its results stack.

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Google said Thursday that it has revamped its basic search ranking algorithm to push more up-to-date results to the top of its results stack.

The emphasis on freshness will have an effect on roughly 35 percent of searches, Google said.

"Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today's world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old, Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, wrote in a blog post.

In June 2010, Google pushed out its Caffeine update to search, which at the time promised "50 percent fresher results for Web searches than our last index," Google said.

Google said that it would prioritize the most recent news in queries that asked about current events, such as the Occupy protests. Likewise, Google said it would also return results that prioritized the most recent events, such as the latest NFL scores. And for reviews, Google also said that it would prioritize the most recent information, as in the most recent SLR reviews.

Google said that in some cases, older results would still be given weight, such as a tomato soup recipe. Google also did not say what would happen as audience focus shifted to the next iteration of a recurring event, such as a search for "summer Olympics."

"Different searches have different freshness needs," Singhal wrote. "This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers."

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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